The effective pest control is part of the intensive vegetable production technologies, however, the expectations of the consumer markets, furthermore the efforts to improve the food safety called for the minimization of pesticides, and replacing them by biological methods. In a closed area production the entire biological control has been achieved against insect pests, however, the biological control of bacteria and fungi is still to be elaborated.
Nowadays there is an increasing need in the fields of vegetable production and sales for bioproducts containing no residues of chemical pesticides. Among the effective chemical pesticides only the inorganic copper-compositions are allowed in the course of production of bioproducts. The number of copper resistant mutants among the vegetable pathogen microorganisms has increased a lot in the last couple of years, thus these copper containing agents alone are insufficient to achieve effective and reliable pest control. One possible solution to overcome this problem is to effect an integrated pest control using copper containing agents and biocontol compositions. Biocontrol products may also be used alone, but in such cases the highest efficiency of the best compositions is still under 50 percent.
The majority of the antibacterial or antifungal biocontrol products presently available in the world market contain one component as active agent, which is a bacterium or fungi possessing antagonist and/or parasite features. The Bacillus strain has long been used for vegetable pest control purposes. The compositions sold are especially effective against vegetable pathogen fungi. The compositions already been commercialized and patented comprise mainly the strains of Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus amiloliquefaciens species. Their effectiveness is explained by different peptide antibiotics, secreted outside of the cell walls, which are effective mainly against fungi: surfactin, iturin, fengycin, bacillomycin, mycosubtilin. Recently it has been suggested that their effectiveness is enhanced by extracellular enzymes decomposing the cell walls and/or the membrane of the cytoplasm of the pathogen microorganism: proteases, kitinases and lipases. Besides, several independent investigations have proved that of the secreted antibiotics mainly fengycin is responsible for exerting of the induced resistance response in the treated plants.